


Collateral

by meanwhiletimely



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Gen, POV Gellert Grindelwald, Resurrection Stone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-10-08 23:51:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17396099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meanwhiletimely/pseuds/meanwhiletimely
Summary: Gellert Grindelwald comes into possession of the Resurrection Stone.





	Collateral

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Collateral](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17714468) by [v_dolokhov](https://archiveofourown.org/users/v_dolokhov/pseuds/v_dolokhov)



> With thanks to [SilverDoe290s](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDoe290s/pseuds/SilverDoe290s) for sparking this story...
> 
>  **collateral** _(adjective)_ — damage inflicted on an unintended target  
>  **collateral** _(noun)_ — something used as security, as in repayment of a debt
> 
> See [TaireBlackfeather](https://archiveofourown.org/users/robinisademon/pseuds/TaireBlackfeather)'s gorgeous illustration [here](https://meanwhiletimely.tumblr.com/post/182016759439/ashesofmyghost-a-short-grindeldore-comic-ive).

_What do you wish to steal for yourself?_  
_What do you wish to hear for yourself?_  
_What will you gain by torture, you torturer!_  
_You—executioner-god!_

— from "Ariadne's Lament" by Friedrich Nietzsche

* * *

It takes him half a decade to steal the Wand, and another decade after that to steal the Stone.

It is in Albus's country—oh,  _naturally_ —hidden in the squalid hut of a pathetic Peverell descendant who hisses out Dark curses that the Wand deflects and rebounds with comical ease.

The duel is done in moments, and the corpse that can now become his first Inferius lies unmoving at his feet. Gellert, laughing, slips the Hallowed ring onto his finger, spinning it around once, twice, _thrice_ —and the laughter freezes in his mouth, clawing at his throat like shards of ice.

A girl in a white gossamer dressing gown has appeared before him, Death shining from her wide blue eyes and red-gold hair. 

"Where is Albus?" asks the soft, sweet voice of Ariana Dumbledore.

Gellert wrenches off the ring with shaking fingers, and the Stone clatters to the blood-soaked floor.

* * *

_Ariana, Ariana, Ariana._

Her name, throughout the years, has become like an incantation—summoning a cascade of memories. 

Ariana: maiden, victim, martyr, tithe.

Ariana: lovely, mad, and  _deadly,_ with a cataclysmic inferno of violence simmering just beneath her fragile bones and frail, pale skin.

Ariana: the broken girl whose death broke Albus—broke Albus and Gellert apart. 

Death stole her.

Now Gellert has stolen her back.

Alone in the highest tower of Nurmengard, he stares out at the moonlit mountains: bracing himself, turning the Stone over and over and over in his hands.

"What have you done?" comes the whisper, at last, from behind him—fraught with apprehension, taut with horror.

Slowly, Gellert turns. "You must know I never meant for you to die."

The luminous shade of Ariana isn't looking at him: she's found the symbol of the Deathly Hallows engraved above the doorway, is eyeing it in dawning understanding.

He steps closer, suddenly breathless. "Can you forgive me?"

Ariana's eyes snap back to him at that—those same piercing, bright blue eyes.

She runs translucent fingers through his hair, and exhales, _"No."_

* * *

The Stone does not raise the dead—only summons up the shadow of a soul.

Gellert supposes he should have known.

 _Recall the dead,_  is the phrase in the tale.  _Recall,_  not  _resurrect_. 

He finds himself calling her often.

Sometimes, when he calls her, she is ready for him: screaming, half-deranged, tearing at his skin with airy teeth and nails that cannot truly touch him—that feel as light as vapor.

Sometimes, when he calls her, she is lost again: shaking with fear, sobbing in confusion, seeming not to hear him when he speaks her name.

Sometimes, he imagines taking her to Albus, delivering the Stone as penance paid—imagines Albus falling to his knees in awe and adulation; imagines smiling beatifically as he weeps and begs forgiveness; imagines entwining a hand in that silky auburn hair and entreating him to demonstrate his gratitude.

It is fantasy, and farcical fantasy, at that. 

 _Though she had returned to the mortal world,_   _she did not truly belong there and suffered._

Albus would not want to see her—not like this. Albus would not thank him for his sister's stolen shadow.

_Finally the brother, driven mad with hopeless longing, killed himself so as to truly join her._

The Stone would bring him Death, not absolution.

Absolution, it would seem, evades them both.

* * *

"Am I to be your prisoner?" asks Ariana. She is calm today, resigned. "Are you my jailer?"

"Death is your jailer," snaps Gellert, without looking up from his papers. Maps, letters, drafts of speeches—a Muggle war is raging across the world, and Gellert has begun to wage his own war in the shadows. "I occasionally see fit to set you free."

Ariana snorts softly, taking in the tower room. "Is this what you call freedom?"

 _Very well,_  thinks Gellert, reaching for the Wand. If she is determined to play the imprisoned maiden in this fairytale castle—and it is a familiar role, a role she is _so_  very good at—he will play the villain they all think he is.

No one plays  _that_ role better.

"Crucio," he says, more out of curiosity than anything. He cannot touch her, but can he hurt her? Can he make her writhe, like her brother?

(The  _other_ brother—though Albus, of course, has writhed, too.)

Ariana does not writhe, does not fall, does not move at all: only smiles, sad and small. "Is it easier, when I scream?" She moves closer, graceful; gliding in her gossamer dressing gown.  _"You_ scream, at night. When you're sleeping." A rush of cold air, her lips at his ear. He shivers. "Shall I tell you what you say?"

Gellert sets down the Wand and picks up the Stone. "Lucid today, aren't we?"

Ariana's smile widens, twists her delicate features into a searing look that can only be described as  _triumph._  

Three turns, and he's released her.

Three turns, and he's alone.

* * *

So perhaps he enjoys it, some days—wrenching her out of Heaven and forcing her to live with him in Hell. What of it? He was kind to her, in life, and look where it got him. Look where it got  _her._

It's only fair, in the end: she is trapped, as he is trapped, as she once trapped Albus.

"You couldn't let me live," says Ariana, at his side, overlooking a Muggle battlefield. "Now you can't let me die."

"Your death was an accident," Gellert reminds her, tearing his gaze away from the bloodshed and brutality beneath them to meet her accusing stare. "You understand accidents, don't you, Ariana?"

A girl who kills her own mother, a boy who kills his own sister—which is more deserving of damnation?

It matters no more than it matters who wins this war: Death, Gellert knows, will win regardless of the killer, regardless of the victor.

Death has never played fair.

* * *

And yet—and _yet._

"Who did it?" he demands at one point—drunk, or something like it. "Which of us truly killed you?"

Ariana glances up from where she's tracing the sign of the Hallows on the wall—leveling him with that familiar, penetrating stare. "Not Aberforth," is all she says, and Gellert laughs and laughs and laughs.

* * *

In the old stories, everything—wishes, curses, verses—comes in threes.

Gellert knows his stories as well as he knows his spells, and _omne trium perfectum,_  goes the Latin phrase: _a set of three is complete._

He has not mastered Death, not yet, not when the third, most elusive Hallow of them all stays lost. 

The Wand was for Gellert, the Stone was for Albus, and the Cloak...

The Cloak was for Ariana.

"We should have been three," he tells her between sips of firewhiskey, pacing sleepless in his chambers after a particularly brutal battle of his own. Alcohol calms the Dark currents surging through his veins, numbs the savage hunger that always comes from slaughter: a ravenous desire to keep slashing and destroying.

The Wand will always want more. The Wand will never be satisfied. 

"I would have brought you with us," he continues. They could have unleashed all that Darkness within her, used her as their tool, their weapon. They could have put her on a stage and let the crowds consume her:  _Look at what Muggles can do. Look at what Muggles have done._  The symbolic face of their revolution. Their sister, their daughter. Their sacrificial saint. "We would have saved the world together—you and me and Albus."

The name settles heavy on his tongue, and his spectral companion tilts her head. The flames in the fireplace behind her have lit up her hair with a crimson glow, flickering away the gold and making it appear full red. "Is that what you're doing?" she asks quietly. "Saving?"

Gellert swallows the last of the whiskey, feels it burning in his throat as he says, "Yes."

Ariana smiles, and speaks a single sing-song word: "Liar."

* * *

That devouring Dark void inside her, that obliterating instinct to hurt, to maim, to kill—it is in him, too. 

The difference, of course, is that in his case, there is no parasite to blame. He is his own affliction, his own curse. He is his own contained chaos.

"Murderer," she murmurs, hovering above him when he wakes from a violent vision—shaking, covered in a sheen of sweat.

Gellert unclenches a fist, sees the Stone in his right hand. It has left a mark on his palm in his sleep: the Hallows symbol imprinted over a faded, long-ago scar.

With carnage and catastrophe and Death still flashing red behind his eyelids, Gellert answers hoarsely, "That makes two of us, my dear."

* * *

They have a bargain, of sorts, Gellert and Death—a truce, an understanding. Gellert delivers souls to Death, and Death grants him power in return.

There is joy in power, satisfaction in drawing blood, in slicing and slaying and slaughtering. All he has to do is raise the Wand. All he has to do is summon up primal Dark chaos and let it consume him. 

Ariana watches with wide-eyed fascination as he strips off his bloodied clothes and draws a bath with wandless magic—a slight tremor in his hands.

"What is it like?" asks Gellert, sinking into water so hot it's scalding—watching it turn red. "Death."

"Bright," Ariana says, distant. "Light, everywhere." A pause. "They're waiting for you, there."

Gellert meets those piercing blue eyes, and cannot suppress a shudder. "Who?"

"Everyone," she says with a small, chilling smile. "Every single one."

He scrubs and Scours his skin until it's throbbing, rubbed raw and red, red, _red_.

Ghostly fingers dance over his aching chest—lingering a moment on the vial worn over his heart. "Blood," Ariana says softly.

She's already fading before he turns the Stone, but Gellert can still hear the chime of her laugh.

* * *

Many things are said of Gellert Grindelwald.

Seer, savior. Rebel, revolutionary. Genius, mastermind. Criminal, terrorist. Most dangerous Dark wizard of all time. No heart, no conscience, no remorse. Impossible to outwit or out-duel. A man of extraordinary beauty, a wizard of extraordinary power. Laughs in the face of Death. As likely to kiss you as to kill you. Could talk his way out of a locked room with no doors. Wears the blood of his enemies on a chain around his throat. Madman. Obsessed with a fairytale. Talks to himself at night in his Dark fortress, communes with voices from beyond, speaks to unseen ghosts.

The first time he forgets himself and addresses Ariana in the presence of others, it is forgettable, forgivable—a passing aside at a rally, as she taunts him from the back of the crowd.

The second time, it is less so. He sits at the head of his war room, half-listening to his acolytes draw up plans for an attack that will kill hundreds in his name, turning the Stone over and over and over between his fingers. It is habit, now—a near-compulsion.

"Is this what you envisioned, all those years ago with Albus?" his angel of Death breathes into his ear. "Is this what you wanted? Is this what you planned?"

"Silence," he hisses out through gritted teeth, and Ariana releases a maddening giggle.

"What would he think now, our Albus—if he could see you now, see _us_ —what would he say—?" 

"Be silent, Ariana!"

He's raised his voice, loud enough to fill the room, and the entire assembly falls at once into silence—staring up at him, unsettled and uncertain. 

Gellert looks down and around, breathing hard. The Wand is in his hands, the Stone is in his coat, and the shade of Ariana is nowhere to be seen.

Was she ever truly there at all? 

"You're going mad," she tells him later, grinning, spinning around in his chambers. "Like me."

Gellert toys with the Stone; considers throwing it out the window. "How does it feel? Madness."

"It feels like falling, or flying." She spins faster and faster, collapsing at last onto the cold stone floor—adding dreamily, "It feels like freedom."

Many things are said of Gellert Grindelwald, but there is one thing only whispered.

 _Prophet_.

Visionary oracles consumed by hallowed purpose, eyes burned to blackened pits by the scorching presence of divinity, and—so say the whispers—aren’t they always  _mad?_

Many things are said of Gellert Grindelwald, and most of them are true.

He stopped caring which a long time ago.

* * *

There has always been a logic to his violence, a rationale behind his goals. The ideals he's fought and struggled for make sense. 

He has always wanted things beyond the scope of common human understanding or attainment, elusive dreams for ordinary wizards, normal men. He wants freedom. He wants justice. He wants Albus. He wants goodness, he wants greatness. He wants a better world, a better future. He wants the Hallows.

And he will have them. He will strive and seek and suffer until he has them all. 

One war is done, not won, and there will be another. There will always be more war. More death, more horror, more desolation, more bodies piled up for the greater good.

 _Grindelwald the Great._ It has a certain ring to it, no? Another golden conqueror, called Alexander, would certainly say so. He toppled empires and laid waste to his enemies, and if his road to transforming the world was paved with corpses— _well_. There is a price to be paid, for greatness. 

The hardest lesson Gellert Grindelwald has ever had to learn: one cannot be both _great_ and _good_.

* * *

The Elder Wand knows no loyalty but to strength, no longing but for blood, no feeling but for power. It is wholly unsentimental and entirely ruthless, with no tolerance for weakness and no patience for emotion. It is an unfeeling and exacting instrument of Death, and nothing more.

But the master of the Elder Wand is only human, after all. 

He closes his eyes, and sees Albus _—_ radiant and resplendent _,_ blue eyes shining with benevolence, deliverance: a kind of rapture.

He closes his eyes, and sees Albus—furious and fierce, bearing down upon him with righteous rage and scorching wrath.

He closes his eyes, and Sees the future: all three Hallows in Albus's hands.

Ariana's incorporeal fingers trace the chain around his neck.

(The Stone, as it turns out, is untroubled by emotion. The Stone is drawn to weakness like a vampire to blood.)

"Do you love him?" Gellert opens his eyes, and finds her smiling: a fond tilt to her mouth that feels achingly familiar, that nearly makes him feel sixteen again. "Our Albus."

 _Love._ This bitter obsession, this monstrous craving, this intolerable weakness, this rapacious urge to bind Albus to him for eternity and never let him go, to destroy him if he cannot have him, in the end—is that love?

Is that the selfless adoration Albus felt, that willingness to give him everything he had and never ask for anything at all, that sublime virtue, that innate, annihilating _goodness_ that Gellert cannot corrupt, cannot destroy, cannot aspire to, cannot even touch?

_Do you love him?_

"No."

Ariana shakes her head, no longer smiling.

"Liar."

* * *

One day, when he calls her, she does not come. 

Gellert flips the stone once, twice, _thrice,_ but no dead girl with red-gold hair appears before him.

Instead, he sees a small young boy.

Half his face is beautiful, cherubic—and the other half, sliced open, skin peeled away in a jagged gash to reveal tattered sinew and glistening bone. Gellert stumbles, fumbles with the Stone, but the mangled, mutilated child still looks up at him in silent censure.

Another turn, and the boy is flanked by a charred, scarred woman with a baby in her arms: blackened, burnt to a crisp. She moves toward Gellert, blind, wailing from a gaping mouth whose tongue has turned to ashes, clawing at him with one skeletal hand. 

Gellert cries out, staggers backward, flips the Stone—and sees a bloodied man, fleshed carved to ribbons, reaching for him with a hard, accusing stare.

Again, again, _again_ he turns the Stone, in increasing panic, desperation, but far from vanishing, the shades of the souls he's taken multiply. Throngs of living corpses—wraith-like, rotting, hollow-eyed—fill the room with every turn, closing in upon him as he sinks, despairing, to the floor: hundreds, thousands, _hundreds_ of thousands, more than he or anyone could ever count. Collateral damage on his quest to remake the world. Sacrifices for the greater good.

The room rebounds with the screams of the dead, and something in him shatters as he drops the Stone.

Golden threads of fate, thin and frayed though they may be, have still tied him to the mortal world, to sanity—but now at last they break, and the threads unravel one by one, and he falls like some winged demon into agony and anguish, attrition and contrition: finally free from all illusion and delusion, lost. 

He cannot hear through screams, cannot see through tears, cannot feel beyond the eviscerating torment in his chest, does not notice as the seething, screaming shadows all around him part at last to reveal a pale figure in a gossamer gown.

She kneels down where he's lying, nearly dying, on the ground, and touches a tear on his cheek with one light finger. 

"Is this madness?" Gellert rasps out, gasping—grasping in vain at her red-gold hair.

"No," says Ariana, cradling his head in her hollow, Hallowed hands. "Remorse."

* * *

Here is the secret. Here is the story.

Death will not ever be mastered. 

The Stone was only ever a stone, and the Wand was only ever a wand, and _that_ is the last appalling truth.

* * *

It's summer in Godric's Hollow.

Perhaps it always is.

The village is as small and quaint as ever, and the graveyard just as gray as he remembers. He steps over the Peverell grave where he met Albus, where two boys laughed and kissed and dreamed against the Hallowed tomb, and finds a newer tombstone three rows over: traces  _Ariana Dumbledore_ on roughened stone.

The amount of tracking spells and tracing charms designed to circumvent all unauthorized international Apparition and Portkey travel into Britain have ensured that the days when the world's most wanted wizard could visit the island in stealth and sneak back out again are long, long gone. The Confederation and the Ministry are both too desperate, now, for that.

Gellert knows he has mere minutes before the entire British Department of Magical Law Enforcement descends upon him with wands blazing. He felt the wards go up as soon as he appeared in Godric's Hollow: there will be no leaving, this time.

He bends down at the grave and flips the Stone.

He can sense her at his side, can feel her watching as he blasts aside the dirt before her tomb; sets the Stone into the hole he's dug and buries it with one last turn—pressing it down with magic and smoothing it over again, undisturbed.

When Gellert glances up, Ariana is gone: disappeared into the ether like a ghost whose business is finished at last.

It's no matter.

He will see her again in moments.

He does not look up when he hears the defeaning  _crack_ behind him, does not turn back to see the Aurors advancing on him—only places the Wand over his heart, against the vial, and opens his mouth to speak the words.

"Gellert."

The Killing Curse freezes on the tip of his tongue, the syllables shriveling up and almost strangling him as he turns, still kneeling on the grave.

Not Aurors, not his executioners or jailers, not his enemies, but  _Albus—_ older and wiser and _better,_ always better; sunlight sparkling across his auburn hair, blue eyes so bright they're almost blinding as they find his own, and Gellert feels the shattered pieces of his soul begin at last to repair themselves; feels finally,  _finally,_ whole.

Slowly—reverently—Gellert places the Wand down at Albus's feet, and bows his head.

"Can you forgive me?"

It comes out as a prayer, as a final, broken plea, and he may be hallucinating the fingers in his hair—may be imagining the answer.

_"Yes."_


End file.
